With the collaboration of our corporate colleagues, we can suggest practical programs to minimize estate, gift and generation-skipping taxes by means of transfers at or before death. We help provide liquidity after death through stock redemptions, partnership buyouts and life insurance. We achieve our clients' objectives with a minimum of tax and administrative cost.

Our estate planning practice includes the preparation and structuring of Wills and various types of trusts, such as revocable living trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, qualified domestic trusts (QDOT), qualified terminable interest property trusts (QTIP), electing small business trusts (ESBT) and qualified Subchapter S trusts (QSST).

We are skilled in identifying opportunities and implementing sophisticated estate planning techniques designed to reduce the tax cost of transferring wealth, including family limited partnerships (FLP), limited liability company (LLC) transactions, gifts and sales to intentionally defective grantor trusts (IDGT), grantor retained annuity trusts and unitrusts (GRAT and GRUT), qualified personal residence trusts (QPRT) and offshore trusts.

Other estate planning tools that we recommend, when appropriate, may involve charitable giving for tax planning purposes which fulfill philanthropic commitments. These charitable vehicles include creating private charitable foundations, charitable lead annuity trusts or unitrusts (CLAT and CLUT) and charitable remainder annuity trusts or unitrusts (CRAT and CRUT). Of course, the benefits of overlapping the charitable foundation or trusts with other estate planning techniques, such as a family limited partnership, can produce positive tax, estate and financial planning results beyond expectations.

Through our representation of corporate and business organizations, we help business owners structure succession planning and business transactions that facilitate estate planning.